In the early-to-mid 'nineties, the industry was buzzing with speculation about the 'new' 32-bit computing platform and, more importantly, how it would integrate into the 16-bit environment.

While 64-bit computing has been around for a while (for the two of you who could afford Intel's Itanium, and now Itanium II processors), the dream of 64-bittery for the humble home system has been a long time coming.

In many ways Itanium represents a change for Intel. Having dominated the desktop PC processor market, the company hopes that its 64-bit silicon will become the de facto choice in the next generation o

Chance or coincidence? AMD releases the Athlon 64, specifically targeted at the consumer performance market, and only days later Intel announces a secret processor aimed squarely at the same MHz-hungry community: the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (P4EE).

Looking to build your dream machine? We explore the latest components on the market, and give you advice on which ones to hunt down, along with the general price you can expect to pay for each major component.

While AMD has been waving hybrid 32/64-bit CPUs for some time now, speculation has risen over when Intel would unleash their product onto an already expecting market. Here it is, Intel's newest addition to their Extreme Edition clocking in at an impressive 3.73GHz and boasting a 2MB L3 cache.

Several PC makers expect to have Nehalem-EX 16-core DP desktops, in fact super workstations, at the chip's launch towards year-end

One would think that, with ever cheaper, faster and more reliable SSD drives, the idea of a small "Turbo Memory" or "Flash Cache", would be passe by now. Not so.

Buying a mid-range Dell notebook now means a choice between Dell's Inspiron, Studio and XPS notebooks. We examine the value.

This first of a new generation is only a little faster than the old, but its potential is clearly huge

Forthcoming 'Barcelona' chip to outpace Intel by 40 per cent, firm claims.

Forthcoming AMD chip to outpace Intel's by 40 per cent, firm claims.

The entire industry is moving towards dual-core technology, but why? Tim Dean looks at some of the reasons for the shift.

PC Authority takes a trip down computer memory lane and discovers just how PC technology has evolved... and how Microsoft and IBM nearly destroyed each other.

Mesh architecture allows for massively scalable multi-core chips.

The price war among Netbooks and mini-notebooks is hot at the moment, especially leading up to Christmas. We source the best prices from around the net this week.

In the performance stakes the 3200+ came up trumps, finishing middle to top of the pack and clearly cementing itself as a solid performing processor for home, office or pure entertainment.

In the workstation graphics market, the name 3Dlabs carries considerable weight, and its Wildcat III series of OpenGL cards continues to be dominating in the high-end workspace. However, in the mid-range sector, NVIDIAs Quadro2 and Quadro4, and ATIs FireGL 8800 have made serious inroads. The new Wildcat VP870 looks set to redress the balance, thanks to a brand-new GPU that takes programmability to a new level.

Impressive and free antivirus and antispyware package

A blisteringly fast processor, strong build and stylish design make this an extremely attractive laptop